1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a computer-based method and apparatus for analyzing a thought system of a subject which consists of at least one individual, based on various and ambiguous items perceived by the subject. More particularly, the present invention is concerned with techniques for retrieving or extracting at least one essential axis of thought system, i.e., at least one essential vector of dimension of the thought system, which is not observed even by the subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is apparent from many experimental rules and results of experiments, a human consciousness includes a multidimensional and complicated thought system. More specifically described, the human thoughts usually, e.g., in a daily life, relate to various kinds of matters or items such as tasks, friends, families, schools, hobbies, money, past matters, future matters, and the like. Moreover, each of these items, e.g., a task is also concerned with many items such as management, perspective, profit-making, and the like, which items are complicatedly related with one another. In general, the human is likely to recognize these items in an unorganized form, rather than in an organized form. Particularly, the human may recognize these items such that these items are not completely independent from one another, but relate with one another by any specific factors. However, the human generally does not or cannot recognize these specific factors.
Due to the above-mentioned ambiguous recognition of the relationship between the perceived items, the individual is prone to fail in appropriate organization of his or her idea upon deciding his or her way of performance, or upon arranging his or her thoughts. This drawback has been widely recognized by experiences. To overcome this drawback, these has been proposed to perform “Manual” method one of which will be described by way of example. Namely, an individual initially picks up items based on his or her perception, and then classifies these items into the appropriate number of groups in accordance with a predetermined standard such as an importance-basis standard, and a character-basis standard. Each of the obtained groups may further be classified or may be combined with another group or the other groups together, as needed, whereby the perceived items are organized into appropriate groups.
The “Manual” method as described above, however, requires the predetermined standard prepared by the individual or others, for prosecution of the classification of the items, so that a results of the method is inevitably affected by the predetermined standard and the classification executed based on the predetermined standard, resulting in insufficient consequent of the method. In particular, there is known that an individual may recognize only a part of his or her thought system, and that the individual's thought system further includes subconscious thoughts which are ambiguously noted or are never recognized by the individuals. Accordingly, the “Manual” method merely allow the individual to classify the recognized items into the appropriate groups. That is, the method is merely provided for arranging the superficially recognized items, resulting in obtaining an insufficient result of the method. Further, when the obtained perceived items have the relatively large number, while being complicatedly correlated with one another, the manual classification of the perceived items on the basis of the predetermined standard is extremely cumbersome and difficult. Thus, this “Manual” method does not work practically to analyze or arrange the items of the individual's thought system.
In recent years, there has been developed a multivariate analysis as one of statistical methods for clarifying scientific phenomenon in which a large number of elements are complicatedly correlated with each other, and the application of this multivariate analysis to various kinds of fields has been considered. One example of the application of this multivariate analysis is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,839,853, wherein the multivariate analysis is used to classify various kinds of documents. The classification of the documents such as books is extremely complicated and difficult, if the contents of the documents are in great variety, leading to a failure in the classification. Therefore, a singular value decomposition, a kind of the multivariate analysis, is performed to analyze the documents based on a data of relationship information between titles of documents and a set of words occurring in more than one title, to thereby obtain a positional data of each of the documents which represent the position of the document on a virtual space. Thus, the documents are displayed in the virtual space according to the obtained positional data, permitting visual recognition of the relationship between the documents, and permitting objective classification of the documents based on this visual recognition.
There has been considered to apply the above-described singular value decomposition to analyze the human thought system which is complicated as described above. However, the conventional singular value decomposition requires two kinds of sets of variables which are clearly distinguishable from each other, e.g., a set of document titles and a set of words occurring in more than one title, as in the above-indicated example. With the two mutually distinguishable set of variables, a matrix is generated so that the analysis is desirably performed on the generated matrix. However, the human thought system may includes perceived items which are ambiguously correlated with each other and are accordingly considered as variables belonging to a single group. Since the conventional singular value decomposition requires clearly distinguishable two kinds of groups of items as described above, the ambiguously-related items of the human thought system are not suitable for the conventional singular value decomposition and the application of the singular value decomposition on the analysis of the human thought system in impractical. Thus, the those skilled in the art would never motivate to apply the singular value decomposition to analyzing the human thought system.